Faculty Advisor
Leisa Meyer
Professor of American Studies, History, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
Leisa Meyer works in U.S. American women’s history/studies, gender history/studies, twentieth-century cultural history/studies, LGBTQ history/studies, and the histories of sexualities. She received her Ph.D. in U.S. American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1993. She is the author of Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II (1996) and co-editor (with Helis Sikk) of Twenty Years Later: The Legacies of Matthew Shepard (2019). Her current work, the W&M LGBTQ History Project, is focused on restoring the histories of LGBTQ Virginians to the collective past. This oral history project is collaborative with W&M undergraduate and graduate students. She was also an associate editor for the Encyclopedia of American Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History & Culture (Scribner’s, 2003), is an editor for the journal Feminist Studies, and serves as a Trustee for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Last, she is an inveterate video gamer though has moved away from her initial infatuation with console gaming to an exploration of PC and mobile online gaming.
Student Members
Jessica Brabble
Ph.D. Student, History
Jessica is interested in researching the use of bodies as spectacle and entertainment at agricultural fairs in the South. She is particularly interested in how particular forms of entertainment–like better baby contests and freak shows–relate to perceptions of disability and ideas of eugenics in the early 20th century. Jessica received her MA in History and Certificate in Public History from Virginia Tech in 2021. While there, she published her work in the Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians, Nursing Clio, and The Washington Post’s Made by History column. Jessica received BA degrees in History, Psychology, and Sociology from North Carolina Wesleyan College in 2019.
Thalia Chrysanthis
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Thalia Chrysanthis is a third year PhD candidate at W&M. She previously completed her M.A. in History at the College of William and Mary in 2021. She received her B.A. with Highest Honors in 2018 from the University of Michigan, majoring in History with a minor in Creative Writing. She earned the Stephen J. Tonsor History of Ideas Award for her undergraduate thesis on the Ninth Amendment in the Supreme Court’s birth control cases of the 1960s and ‘70s. Her current interests include U.S. legal history, histories of women and gender(s), and how these intersect at moments of social and cultural change throughout U.S. history.
Levi Goldson
Junior, History Major
Levi Goldson is a junior at W&M. He is a history major and interested in studying communist history, as well as black, queer, and women’s history.
Samantha Haddad
Ph.D. Student, History
Samantha (Sam) Haddad is a first-year Ph.D. student at the College of William and Mary where she explores the relationship between gender, race, social activism, and transatlantic Irish republicanism during the Northern Irish Troubles. Samantha graduated Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and with departmental honors from Mount Holyoke College in 2019 and holds a B.A. in both History and Art History. In 2021, Samantha obtained her M.A. in Irish and Irish American Studies from New York University. That same year, the American Conference of Irish Studies (ACIS) recognized her work on Irish women’s history at both the national and regional levels. Samantha has served as a contributor to Writing the Troubles, Reconstructing the Ethnic Village and numerous public history projects concerning contemporary Irish and Irish American history as well as worked at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has forthcoming published work concerning race and Irish womanhood and women’s prison material culture during the Northern Irish conflict.
Emily Magness
Ph.D. Student, History
Emily Magness (Cherokee Nation) is a second-year history PhD student with research interests in gender, war, and politics in eighteenth-century Cherokee country. In 2021, Emily received her B.A. in History from Wellesley College. She received her M.A. from William & Mary in 2022. Her most recent work focuses on the ways kinship responsibilities and blood law influenced Cherokee decision-making during the Anglo-Cherokee War..
Molly Shilo
Ph.D. Candidate, American Studies
Molly Shilo is a doctoral candidate at the College of William and Mary in the American Studies program. Her scholarly interests include postcolonial and feminist studies, critical race theory, and embodiment. She is currently working on writing her dissertation, which examines how empathy is rhetorically deployed within various institutional sites and media. Specifically, she is interested in how empathy might be used as an entry point into examining contemporary social justice rhetoric of “lived experience” and how that rhetoric shapes our understanding of effective pedagogy.
Sydney Sweat-Montoya
Ph.D. Student, History
Sydney’s research interests include borderlands, sovereignty, and economic culture in the Caribbean. Her current research project explores how the Spanish and British empires conceptualized settlements in the southern Yucatán during the eighteenth century. Sydney received her B.A. in History from University of West Georgia. She holds an M.A. in History from Virginia Tech where her research focused on fiscal policy and taxation in the early United States.
Meagan Thompson
Ph.D. Candidate, American Studies
Meagan Thompson (she/they) is a PhD candidate in the American Studies Program at The College of William & Mary. She earned her B.A. in English at Roanoke College and M.A. in English from Old Dominion University. Their interests include trauma and performance studies, queer theory, feminist disability studies, and contemporary American literature. She is particularly interested in the intersection of trauma and utopia, exploring how marginalized peoples construct and maintain pockets of joy through quotidian practices of performance and storytelling as a means of protest and resistance. Their dissertation explores these themes in contemporary queer memoir.
Rebekah Toussaint
Ph.D. Student, History
Rebekah Toussaint is a first-year Ph.D. student at the College of William and Mary, where her research focuses on intersections of gender and race in 19th century social movements, both from American and transnational perspectives. She is further interested in public history, memorialization, and memory. Rebekah earned a B.S. in Sociology and International Studies (2013), a M.A. in Humanities (2016), and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies (2016) from Old Dominion University. Her M.A. thesis, “We Are Still in Apartheid:’ Girls’ Perspectives on Education Inequality in Democratic South Africa and Models for Social Change,” examined the historic barriers that Black South African girls faced in pursuit of secondary and higher education under apartheid, and how those barriers have evolved and remained since the legal ending of apartheid. Since 2016 she has taught courses in Women’s and Gender Studies at the collegiate level as an instructor for Old Dominion. She developed several courses including “History of Women’s Activism,” “Activism and the #MeToo Movement,” and “Gender in Film.”
